


Blanket On The Ground

by LogicGunn



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Fluff, M/M, SGA Saturday Prompt Challenge, Touch-Starved, blanket
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:13:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29226780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LogicGunn/pseuds/LogicGunn
Summary: John realises he has a need.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Comments: 28
Kudos: 78
Collections: SGA Saturday Prompt Challenge





	Blanket On The Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Quick little fic for the [SGA Saturday Week #266-270](https://sga-saturday.dreamwidth.org/176510.html) prompt "Blanket".
> 
> Title from the Billie Jo Spears song.

John slumps down onto the couch and kicks his legs up on top of the coffee table, beer in one hand, remote in the other. He takes a big swig, relishing in the ice-cold refreshment as he flicks the channel to watch the CFL highlights. Candian Football is nothing like its American counterpart, and it’s not just the technical differences, the extra player and the size of the field, the different rules and the fact that they continue to play when the timer reaches 00.00. It’s all so congenial, excessively polite and gentlemanly, lacking the rough, raw, violent edge that the good ol’ US of A instils in its players. Rodney set up a VPN on the computer in the study, and a wireless link from that to the TV so that John can watch ESPN on-demand, but he’s on the cusp of some critical, scientific breakthrough for the SGC and so he’s bogarting the raw processing power of the PC instead of curling up on the couch with John and tapping away on the keyboard of one of his many laptops. John likes to complain about the sounds of the keys clip-clipping in his ear, but secretly he misses Rodney’s warm presence and his huffing and his periodic outbursts waxing lyrical about the virtues of hockey and how he pretends not to ogle the men in tight trousers but John catches him looking up from time to time, eyes wide and tongue flickering between his lips as he follows the curve of a well-muscled thigh. 

Sometimes, when Rodney fails to hide his keen interest, John gets it in his head to start weightlifting, but then he reminds himself that he’s not a young man anymore, and someone on his side of fifty can’t just take up barbell squats and lunges without a Doctor’s note, so he rummages around behind the cushions for Rodney’s Dorito bag and demolishes it with glee instead, loosens his belt by one or two notches, and licks the powder off his fingers. Today there are no Doritos; Rodney hasn’t sat on the couch in over a week, and John finished the last hidden packet days ago. He could dig around in the corner cupboard and grab a new one, but it’s just not the same, and if he’s honest, the Football isn’t doing anything for him either. 

Sighing to himself, John turns off the TV and dumps the remote on the table. He tips his head back and downs the last of his beer, then taps his thigh with the fingers of his free hand. It takes him a while to realise that his fingers are tapping to the beat of Rodney’s frantic typing, the clackety-clack echoing up the hall and in through the open door of the open-plan living room slash kitchen. John hauls himself to his feet and shuffles over to the trash can, dropping his beer bottle into the recycling then peering out the big window over the kitchen sink as he turns on the tap to wash his hands. 

Outside it’s a perfect summer evening, the sun low in the sky, the evening light a warm, diffuse glow that filters through the trees lining the pasture out back. It’s nothing like the blue-tinged sunlight of New-New-Lantea, its class A star so much hotter than Earth’s Sol, but it still brings to mind evenings on Atlantis where John and Rodney snuck out to the pier to drink beer and make out way back in the beginning of their relationship, shortly after the city returned to the Pegasus Galaxy. It was a first for both of them, falling in love with a man and they took it slow, would lie on a blanket on the pier and kiss for hours, wandering hands and huffed breaths. It was weeks before they moved on from making out to heavy petting, months before they tumbled into John’s quarters and undressed each other, fell back onto the bed and worked themselves into sticky, sated bliss. 

The first time Rodney tried to blow John, he’d barely gotten his mouth on him when John’s hips stuttered and he spurted impolitely in Rodney’s mouth and all over his face. (In John’s defence, there had been a lot of teasing in the weeks building up to that one act.) Rodney took it with more grace than John could have expected, but still. 

They’ve come a long way since then, learned how hard to press and where to stroke, how to draw it out and speed it up, explored fantasies that rocked their bed (and others that ended abruptly in boner-killing snickers under the covers). Even as the years creep in on them (John’ hair streaked with silver and Rodney’s hairline pulling ever further up towards the heavens) they still enjoy each other, still take time for mutual pleasure and orgasms and post-coital happiness, but more and more things have been rushed; hand jobs in the shower, quick and dirty blow jobs late at night when they should be sleeping. Rodney’s workload at the moment is intense, and though he’s working from home, he might as well be thousands of miles away in Cheyenne Mountain for all that John barely gets to set eyes on him during daylight hours. And it’s not as though their sex life has gotten stale or anything, John doesn’t have complaints so much as a pressing need to touch and be touched, unhurried and lingering. Skin on skin, yeah, that’d be good. 

John turns off the tap and dries his hands. It’s getting late in the day, but it’s been pushing 80 degrees all day so it’s still warm out. A nice evening for a stroll down to the creek, sit by the rushing water, maybe have another beer. He turns, spots the blanket on the back of Rodney’s chair. It’s a mess of colour and random patterns, something that Teyla hand knitted for Rodney when he spent six weeks recovering from the Pegasus version of Chicken Pox and couldn’t keep his body temperature up. He was in isolation for the whole time, with only Teyla and Ronon allowed to visit on account of having had the disease as children. To John, it felt like an eternity, only able to watch Rodney through a security camera and talk over a radio. The blanket found a permanent home on Rodney’s bed in Atlantis after he recovered, then their shared bed once DADT was abolished, and now the chair in their home on Earth where he pulls it down around his shoulders in the harsh winters when the log burning stove struggles to keep the cabin warm. It’s garish and unstructured, and it clashes with everything, but Rodney loves it almost as much as his Nobel Prize. And so John picks it up and throws it over his shoulder, grabs the rest of the six-pack from the fridge and heads down the hall to Rodney’s home office, stepping inside the open door and waiting patiently for Rodney’s brain to pause in its attempt to further humanities understanding of the cosmos and notice that his husband is breathing down his neck. 

Rodney doesn’t even turn round. “Hmmm?” he says. 

“Hey, Rawdney,” drawls John, as annoyingly as he can. 

The typing slows, then stops, and Rodney spins around in his chair to look at John. His eyes widen at the sight of his beloved blanket. “What are you doing with my blanket?” he asks. John sucks in a breath, but Rodney bulldozes over him. “I swear to god, John, if you get it dirty or torn or...or make it unravel I’ll-” 

“Relax, buddy. It’s fine.” John smooths a hand over the wool. “See? It’s totally in one piece.” 

“Right. So what...?” 

“Can you take a break?” 

Rodney glances at the math on his monitor. “I’m, uh, I’m kind of in the middle of-” 

“Yeah, but...like...can it wait till tomorrow? It’s important.” 

“I really should-” Rodney looks back at John, and his face softens. “Okay, yeah, sure. I’ll just send Sam what I’ve done and let her finish the calculations. It’s about time she earned her share of the funding on this project. _I’m a mother, Rodney, I can’t spend all my time at the computer._ Bah.” 

John knows that Rodney dotes on Carter junior because he spent an entire week at O’Neill’s cabin helping her with her science project, so he doesn’t take this rant to heart. “I’ll wait by the door,” he says. 

“I’ll just be a sec.” 

John watches Rodney connect to the SGC’s encrypted server and type in the first of three twenty-eight-digit alphanumeric passwords, then turns and heads back to the living room. Rodney makes John wait all of ten minutes before he hears the creak of his chair and the snick as he shuts the office door. He’s stretching out his spine and scratching his stomach as he enters the living room, and the sight makes John smile. 

“So what are we doing?” asks Rodney as John herds him out the front door. 

“It’s a surprise,” says John. 

Rodney stands on the porch and peers around as though he’s never seen the countryside before. “A surprise,” he says. “Outside.” 

“Yup.” John closes the door and hops down the steps two at a time. He reaches out and slips his free hand in Rodney’s, then tugs him across the gravel and to the pasture. He knows that Rodney will bitch and moan if he has to climb the fence, so he leads them the long way to the gate. There are no cattle in the pasture at the moment, though they do let it out to a farmer down the road when her own needs a breather from trampling hooves. On the far side of the pasture is a creek, shallow and fast, with good trout fishing for when O’Neill visits (though he always throws them back and barbeques steak for dinner instead). It’s beautiful and tree-lined, and they have a painting of it on the wall in their bedroom that Lorne made when last time he came through from the Pegasus Galaxy. Rodney grumbles when John makes him cross the stepping stones to the other side, but there’s a place a couple of minutes upstream where the bank is lush with green grass, and when they get there John hands the beer to Rodney and lays the blanket down flat. 

“This is your important thing?” asks Rodney. 

“It sure is,” says John, and he sits down on the blanket and pats the space next to him. “Siddown.” 

Rodney huffs for a moment, then sits next to John, dumping the beer in front of them. “I don’t suppose you’ll clue me in as to the occasion? I’m pretty sure it’s not an anniversary of some kind, and it’s not your birthday, I know that’s in January. It’s not my birthday, or, you know, that day I got my Nobel. Is it some kind of American holiday? Are we celebrating the date that Colombus landed in the New World? Cause I have some pretty strong feelings about that, and-” 

“Jeez, Rodney, chill. It’s not an important date.” John twists the top off of one of the beer bottles and hands it to Rodney. “Drink up.” 

Rodney takes the bottle and peers at the label for a moment. John thinks he’s going to protest the loss of his brain cells or fact that John’s bought imported American swill when they live in Canada, home of the best of the best beer in the world, but he just shrugs his shoulders and takes a swig. John opens his own bottle and does the same. Rodney’s sitting rigidly, his body tense and poised to escape, and that’s not what John is going for at all, so he shuffles closer and presses their thighs together. Rodney presses back subconsciously, his eyes on the flowing water, hand picking at the edge of the blanket. They drink in silence, Rodney’s mind clearly back in his office and John stuck not knowing how to articulate what he wants. He’s always been a man of action rather than words, so when Rodney finishes his beer he dumps both of their bottles on the grass and pulls Rodney down until they’re lying side by side on the blanket, looking up at the sky where Venus has just made an appearance in the darkening sky. 

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” asks John. Rodney turns his head and looks at him, but John keeps his eyes on Venus. 

“Don’t laugh,” says Rodney. 

“When have I ever!” exclaims John sneaking a peek at Rodney’s face, but okay, alright, yeah. Maybe that’s not entirely true. 

Rodney rolls his eyes. “I wanted to be a fireman.” 

“That’s not so strange buddy.” 

“Yeah, but my aunt took me to the fire station fundraising day and I got a ride in the fire truck. Turns out I couldn’t stand the sound of the siren. I screamed the whole way around the park.” 

John smiles. He can just imagine a young, chubby-cheeked Meredith Rodney McKay grinning from ear to ear at the sight of the big red truck and having a meltdown when faced with the noisy reality. As an adult, Rodney has done some exceptional work in some of the loudest, noisiest, most audibly distracting situations that you can imagine, but John knows it’s taken years of self-training and discipline for him to be able to do so, and that often the recovery time needed afterwards was frustrating for everyone involved. 

Rodney nudges John with his ankle. “What about you?” 

“Well, when I was really young, I wanted to be a stable master...” 

“Hmmm, you’ve mentioned the horse-riding before.” 

“...but then I wanted to be a baker.” 

Rodney drops his head onto John’s shoulder. “You could always retrain,” he says. 

“Yeah?” 

“I mean, fifty is the new thirty, or so Radek says. If you want to bake cakes, who am I to get in the way of your dreams?” 

“You just want me to make you pancakes for breakfast.” 

“True.” 

Rodney’s eyes are closed, and John shuffles around so that he’s facing him. He tugs on Rodney’s arm to pull him over, and Rodney slides his knee in between John’s. He’s starting to loosen up and doesn’t complain when John slides his cold hand up the back of his shirt. John presses his face into Rodney’s neck and smooths his hands over the expanse of his back. Rodney’s always had soft skin, but it’s a while since John simply touched it for the sake of touching it. 

“John Patrick Sheppard, are you making a play for my virtue?” says Rodney smugly into his ear. 

“Nah. I’m not starting anything. I’m just...” 

“Touching.” 

“Right.” 

Rodney’s silent for a moment, but then his hand burrows under John’s t-shirt and skim his low-rising jeans, fingertips swirling patterns over his hip that could be the literal secrets of the universe for all John knows. He hums a satisfied noise and presses closer until they’re chest to chest, no air between them. John sighs at the press of Rodney’s lips to his neck, up his jaw and across his face, then softly, gently on his mouth. The kiss is sweet and familiar, comforting and soothing. John closes his eyes and just lets himself feel. Rodney shifts his hips, and John can feel him hard against his hip, but there’s no sense of urgency or efficiency, just a deep-rooted desire to touch and be touched in return. It’s not important where this goes, or doesn’t, all that matters is that they have time, under the setting sun and the rising moon, just to be. 


End file.
